This is a think-piece.  I hope that it will inspire you to think about its subject matter. Please approach it with an open mind.

Hello World!  I’m going to take a moment to discuss the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, namely freedom of religion, speech, and the right to assemble.  The First Amendment is one of the many quirks of the US constitution. It states the following:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

It is important to consider the historical context in which the Constitution and its Amendments were written.  It was written in a time of autocratic monarchs with absolute control. It was designed to protect every citizen, regardless of station, from government censorship, state-owned press, and the suppression of dissension.  It was designed to allow for citizens to express grievances with their government in a time when doing so was sometimes punishable by death.  Since the United States was to be a secular nation, this amendment also protected our right to worship as we please, with some exceptions.

And yet, there are some exceptions to the 1st amendment; it is applied in different ways to different people. And the amendment is not nearly as broad as many believe it is.

To my free speech warriors, this one's for you. 

So, let’s talk about it.

You have a right to freedom of speech, but not in all cases.

Freedom of speech is defined as “the freedom of an individual or community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or legal sanction.” 

Let’s consider the historical context in which the amendment was written.  It was designed to protect our right to speak our truth to power and restrict the government from infringing on that right. 

This restriction is primarily limited to the government, though. For example, Reddit, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, are not governments (yet). They are privately controlled social media companies.  They are perfectly within their rights to ban and censor any content on their platforms.  They are not beholden to the First Amendment.

Private citizens are also exempt.  Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequence or criticism.  Any citizen has a right to use their freedom of speech to retaliate against other forms of speech.  In fact, the First Amendment practically demands that communities police themselves by attempting to remove the government from the picture.

Again, the amendment was designed to protect the citizens’ right to criticize the State. This is a right that has not always been afforded to the citizens of many countries, past and present. In some countries, you can be thrown in jail or even executed for criticizing your country's leaders. In many countries, the news is directly controlled by the government (In the USA, it’s more indirect); the government's truth is your truth. Freedom of speech is designed to protect American citizens from this fate, nothing more.

But that's not the only way it protects us.

The United States was meant to be a secular country.

In God we trust. How did that phrase become such an immutable aspect of our culture?  Well, there are two reasons.  Our country is a majority Christian nation.  Also, during the Cold War, we specifically aligned our interests with religion and Christianity to better oppose the secular USSR.

And yet, we should never adopt Christianity as our state religion, so long as this amendment exists.  The amendment explicitly forbids this in its very first line.  I say this as a Christian myself. 

Freedom of religion means that we have a right to practice our religions, whatever they may be.  Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, none of the above (or at all), all the above, Satanism. The US constitution protects all religions, with one case exception; our religious practices cannot harm our fellow citizens.  For example, we cannot kidnap and murder our fellow citizens in the name of religion.

Unfortunately, in practice, we enforce Christianity and discriminate against other religions. Atheists, who do not believe in the existence of God, and other minority religions are underrepresented in our country’s leadership.  Like many of our laws, the First Amendment is applied differently for those in power and those who are not.

If you're upset about that (I am), you are in luck.  There is another useful protection in the 1st amendment.

People, from all backgrounds, have the right to assemble.

Particularly, we have the right to protest what we disagree with, especially when it's non-violent.  This is not a uniquely American experience, but it's not a standard feature of government. As mentioned earlier, many countries, past and present, did not have this protection. Speak out against your government, you get arrested (or worse). 

If this worked perfectly, American citizens could organize in protest of the aspects of our society that we disagree with. In a democracy, if enough people express grievances with their government, then new laws would be made (by the people or their representatives) to address those grievances.

Unfortunately, America is not a perfect democracy.  In fact, it is currently classified as a flawed democracy and is less democratic than 24 other countries.  If you are a Leftist like myself, you would likely instead categorize the U.S.A as a capitalist oligarchy, not a democracy.

The hierarchical nature of U.S. society means that the right to assemble and protest is applied differently to different groups of citizens.  If you're a person of color, you are lower on the social hierarchy and have diminished social power.  If you express your grievance with the racial social hierarchy, you may still find yourself on the business end of state-sanctioned violence. If you're not a person of color, well, you can stage a coup and go right up to the Capitol. In short, we are allowed to protest, but only if it doesn't threaten the current social hierarchy.  In a full democracy, there would be no social hierarchy because social power would be distributed evenly across the population.  One person, one vote.

Despite these flaws in our democracy, so long as the First Amendment is on the books, we have the right to speak up. We have a right to demand change, to demand justice.  We have a right to demand democracy, in its full.  I'd even argue that we have a responsibility to do so.

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